


down in a shallow grave

by Solanaceae



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/F, POV First Person, the river loves you and wants to consume you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 18:23:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20783072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/pseuds/Solanaceae
Summary: Their first mistake is that they bury you by the river.





	down in a shallow grave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).

> let goldberry be an eldritch riverbeing!

****Their first mistake is that they bury you by the river.

It is a simple thing for me to filter through the soil, pool beneath the stones of your cairn. Under my watchful eye, once-shining black hair grows dull and matted. The meat sloughs off your bones, leaving behind pristine white. You rot slowly, and I wait. Blood turns black. The river runs from beneath the earth and passes by your grave and carries a little more of you to me each year. 

If someone had considered _ why _ this mountain-haven was so perfectly empty, if someone had thought to wonder at the strange clarity of the river and the way no tree dares dip root into the shallows, perhaps—perhaps. But I was careful, and I still am. 

I am a truth that has not been revealed. And _ you _—you are a gift that I would be foolish to squander. 

Strange things bloom on you, lightless and creeping, and with every slip further into rot, you grow only lovelier. 

:

Do you know about rain and rivers, bone-pale girl? 

The rain that falls on your city and slicks the white streets is rebirthed rain, evaporated and condensed a thousand times. The salt-laced sea is ever-replenished by water born over and over again, accustomed to movement and newness. This river, my river, it comes from beneath the mountains, and it is ancient and untouched. It remembers silence and dark and ravenous stillness.

Like the river, I hunger. There is a light in your marrow, silver and gold, alien to me. Your decay seeping into the earth is sweet as roses in my mouth. 

I am the River-daughter. I saw the beginning, and I will be the ending.

:

Time trickles by. You are not my only blooming, just the most significant. I practice on the small creatures in the forest, the silver-flashing fish in the river. Flesh to bone to water. Death is a malleable thing, decay only temporary—I could return you to your body as it was, but you are so beautiful and bloodless. 

No, I will make you into something new.

:

Their second mistake is that they forget you.

Oh, your brother mourns you for decades, and the shadow in your son’s eyes never truly leaves. But I listen in the fountains, nearly invisible under the water, dismissable as a flash of golden sunlight on the rippling surface, and they never say your name again. They speak around the emptiness until they forget it is there.

Unnamed things have a power. And you are tethered to the earth, only partly through my doing, and each unspoken memory winds its way into the groundwater, filters itself into our bodies. 

: 

_ Lovely one, _ the river whispers, tangling waterweed around your bones, knitting you flesh that cannot decay, that cannot be poisoned. 

_ Lovely one. _I make you out of my own body, give you veins of water and a throat of river mud. You sleep, airless and quiet. I twine myself around you, a lovemaking beyond what you would have understood in your bodily life.

_ Lovely one, you are mine. _

:

Their third mistake is that they leave you behind.

The city of white stone burns. Far away, to the north, is a dark power that I care not to challenge, so long as my river remains. Your people flee, and your grave by the river—unvisited for decades, grown over with moss and lichen and filled with water—remains. You float beneath the surface, the dark weeds of your hair floating around your face. 

It is time for you to wake.

A gentle nudge of my will. You open your eyes, and they are flat ice, sightless white. You do not need to see; I am your eyes. The river caresses you, and through my gaze, you see yourself born anew, you see me, the river that swallows you, the water that loves you.

We smile.


End file.
